Fifty years to the day the since Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, cities across the United States honored him Wednesday with ceremonies and performances, as well as reflections on what today's civil rights advocates can do to carry forward his legacy.

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Solemnity will be the order of the evening, when sites will ring bells 39 times, symbolizing the civil rights leader's age at his death. Bells will toll about the time King was shot in Memphis, Tennessee.

Speakers challenged listeners to push for justice and equality, as they expect King would have today.

"If even then, the future -- not the past -- was what made us a movement, I believe we carry on the King tradition best by focusing on the here and now as King did as he led the civil rights movement," Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington's nonvoting delegate to Congress, said just after noon at a wreath-laying ceremony at his memorial near the National Mall.

King's youngest child, Bernice, said King would have been excited about some of today's movements, including Black Lives Matter, efforts to quell gun violence and #MeToo campaigns against abuse of women, she told CNN.

"I'm sure that he would be making connections with these movements to make sure that they had what they needed in terms of understanding organizational strategy and planning so that they could bring about effective change," Bernice King, now 55, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Perhaps the grandest, most sweeping memorial was in Memphis, where King was slain while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

The daylong tribute there -- featuring speeches, videos and singing and spoken-word performances -- was largely held in the courtyard of the motel, now home to the National Civil Rights Museum.

Some people at the event held signs reading, "I am a man." They were reminiscent of the signs carried in 1968 in that city by sanitation workers whose strike King had come to support.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson -- one of only two surviving members of King's entourage on the day he was shot -- was among the speakers at the Memphis tribute.